OpenGL® Shading Language, Third Edition

Afterword

Writing a book requires a lot of time and effort. Sometimes authors refer to the finished product as “a labor of love.” I have to say that, for me, writing this book has been “a labor of fun.”

I have been fortunate to participate in a major architectural revolution in computer graphics hardware. In the last few years, consumer graphics hardware has undergone a sea change—from pure fixed functionality to almost complete user programmability. In many ways, this time feels like the late 1970s and early 1980s, when significant advances were being made in computer graphics at places like the University of Utah, NYU, Lucasfilm, JPL, UNC, and Cornell. The difference this time is that graphics hardware is now cheap enough and fast enough that ...